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02/16/2005 Entry: "Blogger Bash not for All Puget Sound Area Bloggers"

Via Robert Scoble's Link Blog pointing to Sound Politics, I read about James J. Na's piece in the Seattle Times: Urge to rant propelling blogs to status of mainstream media (read quick before it goes in the archives). James (a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Discovery Institute) was at the Blogger Bash I also attended last month, hosted and instigated by Andy MacDonald. He describes himself as new to the world of blogs, and I wrote to him to disagree with some of the conclusions he drew from the party experience.

Hi, James!

I was at the blogger bash because Andrew kindly invited me, but it certainly wasn't a gathering for all area bloggers! Andrew specifically said on the evite that it wasn't to be publicly blogged ahead of time. The attendees were those who were part of Sound Politics or friendly to that group. (I was the odd non-political blogger in the mix -- I'm liberal but I rarely write about politics. I hadn't met Andrew or anyone else there before that night.)

Sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you; you seemed to be in a tight conversational circle during most of the time I was there.

I think the Seattle weblog meetup (happens tonight! join us if you can!) gets more of a cross-section of the local blog population, but even we are only a small group compared to all the people who blog nowadays around here.

But bloggers are certainly not a "a decidedly conservative lot". Scan the list at Seablogs for a more representative spectrum. Most bloggers don't write about politics, liberal or conservative. It bugs me that political weblogs seem to get all the oxygen, but it's like the blind men and the elephant: one sees the world from the lens of one's own experience. Perhaps when you write about politics it seems like everyone else does, too!